


sailing from another world

by sparkycap



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: F/M, Post-Canon, Pre-Canon, Pre-Hale Fire (Teen Wolf), Soul Bond, Time Travel, Young Peter Hale
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-20
Updated: 2020-05-20
Packaged: 2021-03-02 22:55:20
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,543
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24294694
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sparkycap/pseuds/sparkycap
Summary: Lydia learns how to open a passage through time with her voice, but not how to control when or where she ends up. Somehow, she always finds herself at the Hale house in the years before it burned.
Relationships: Peter Hale/Lydia Martin
Comments: 4
Kudos: 64





	sailing from another world

**Author's Note:**

> Full disclosure, I don't really know what a banshee is outside what they said in TW. I have no idea what banshee powers are. Now they include time travel! It's cool, we're just going with it.
> 
> Title from Wolves Without Teeth by Of Monsters and Men.

When Lydia is five years old, she knows her scream is powerful.

It’s the most powerful tool she has, with the possible exception of her tears. Once, she would have ranked it below her big green eyes and the chubby cheeks that win her the favor of every adult she knows, so long as she bears their condescending coos and keeps her smart mouth shut. Then her parents stopped noticing those things, stopped noticing much of anything beyond their own private war, in which Lydia is a pawn but not a participant.

Even when kindergarten is Lydia’s most daunting battlefield, she knows there is far more dignity in being a participant. That’s how you _win_.

So Lydia screams. Lydia screams, and her parents startle out of their latest petty disagreement to make sure she’s not dying. Lydia screams on the playground, and a teacher comes running over to stop Jackson Whittemore from pulling her pigtails because she’d called him stupid during reading time. Lydia screams when she feels like crying, and she’s allowed to stay home from school and rest, as if there’s something wrong with her and not the public school system.

She’s careful not to abuse her power. Not out of any moral obligation, but because she’s heard of the girl who cried wolf, thank you very much.

* * *

Much later, Lydia finds out that she’s been underestimating herself. It starts with standing in front of a wall of glass, not sure she can break it with her voice. _Glass_. She doesn’t think she can break _glass_ —

Her scream, she finds later, can rend flesh and bone. She can pierce the veil between life and death. She can tear apart the fabric of reality, though currently she’s dealing not in universes, but in time.

The first time that happens, the tear—she steps through.

* * *

No one believes Peter about the woman who is haunting him.

Peter _knows_ he’s a liar. It’s a little disappointing that the rest of his family knows too, because it means he’s not as good as he should be, but he’s only eight. He’ll get there. So, no, he’s not particularly offended that no one believes him, but their ignorance chafes. A family of werewolves can’t find the imagination to believe in one green-eyed ghost?

That’s the part that makes Talia laugh and mess up his hair, not _because_ she knows he hates when she does that but _despite_ it, which is worse. “Little brother,” she says, “ghosts can’t have green eyes. They’re shades. They’re colorless.”

Peter’s ghost isn’t colorless. She’s the right kind of pale, but her leather jacket is most definitely the color of the twilight sky. Her hair takes on a distinctly orange tint in the moonlight shining through his bedroom window. Her mouth is red and shiny—Peter notices because he wonders if it would taste like candy or blood. Her eyes are wide, haunted, hollow. Like a ghost’s should be, but green.

She doesn’t speak to him until the full moon.

It’s the third time she’s back, and for the first time, he sees a flicker of feeling cross her face. Surprise. “Why are you chained up?”

“Because I’m a monster,” Peter tells her. He waits a beat, for effect, and then he lets his fangs drop and his eyes flash yellow, and he lunges forward in his chains, snarling. It hurts his wrists, but it’s worth it to see his ghost stumble back and grip the windowsill behind her. Peter collapses into laughter, knowing he’s finding it far funnier than he should but unable to resist the madness of the moon. He laughs until it hurts, and he’s surprised when his ghost lets out a breath that might be a laugh too.

“You’re a little psychopath,” she says, but she doesn’t sound surprised this time. “But your eyes are gold.”

“So?” Peter asks.

The ghost purses her shiny lips and shakes her head. She’s quiet again, quiet like before, quiet like the dead.

Peter stretches luxuriously in his chains. One day, when he’s older, when he’s found an anchor that works for him, he’ll have more control, and he won’t need to be restrained at all. Talia told him so again tonight, sitting on the edge of his bed before she left and stroking his hair back in the way he doesn’t hate so much. Last full moon, he’d been allowed to run with the pack, but there’d been an incident at school this week, a human boy who’d gotten under his skin, and Peter _may_ have sworn vengeance by the light of the moon, but he didn’t _mean_ it. Much.

“So,” his ghost says finally, “you’re not a monster yet, Peter.”

Yet. The word lingers in the silence after the girl is gone. Peter aches to run, to shift, to catch up with his pack. He howls and howls, and wishes she’d kept her stupid shiny mouth shut.

* * *

That’s three versions of Peter Hale that Lydia has met now. She’s not sure she’d have recognized the boy, if not for the teenager. They have the same dark hair and disarmingly pretty blue eyes. The man’s eyes are colder, more like ice.

When she was sixteen, Lydia had wandered through the preserve for him on some of the coldest nights of the year. She’s not sure she’s ever truly been warm again since.

* * *

Peter is smart. Too smart for his own good, everyone is always telling him. They say _clever_ like it means something awful, something scary. Every so often, Peter stands in front of a mirror and lets the wolf look out through his eyes just to make sure they’re still gold.

Still _good_.

Peter is good at a lot of things. He’s good at school, and he’s good at basketball. He’s good at charming teachers, though not so much the other students. He’s quick in every way, good at running and scheming and lying. He’s a very good liar, now.

When he’s twelve, his nephew is born, and he realizes he’s not as quick on the uptake as he thought he was—his ghost is not a ghost at all.

He hasn’t seen her in years, but he still dreams of her. At first, he thinks that’s what’s happening now; he’s accidentally fallen asleep waiting for his sister to stop screaming. He digs his claws into his palms to wake himself up, but that only makes his ghost frown at him. He jumps to his feet from where he was slumped against the garden wall. “You’re back.”

She tilts her head. It’s almost a wolfish gesture; he likes it. He’s old enough now to notice that his ghost is gorgeous. Maybe he really has dreamed her up. “I’m back,” she says. “What are you doing out here, Peter?”

“Staying out of the way,” he says automatically. Those are the current orders from his alpha, no matter how often he’s given the exact same ones. Almost as if they don’t want him around. The thought doesn’t amuse him as much as it usually does. He bristles. “This is _my_ pack’s house. What are _you_ doing here? How do you know my name?”

“I’m not a threat to your pack,” she says, which answers exactly none of his questions. She’s looking up at the second-floor windows, listening to his sister’s labor, but she catches it when he flinches at a particularly harsh wail. She arches an eyebrow. “Are you worried?”

Peter clenches his fists. His claws are still out; blood drips steadily to the ground below him. He likes to imagine it as an offering. “Childbirth is messy.”

“So is self-mutilation.” The girl waves toward his bloody palms. “Seriously, stop doing that. It’s rude.”

Peter’s hands loosen purely from the shock. As if anchoring himself is somehow an inconvenience to _her_. “Excuse me?”

“You’re excused,” she says. “Clean yourself up and sit back down. Honestly, Peter, only you could turn your nephew’s birth into some kind of bloodbath. Well, any birth is already a bloodbath, I suppose. But it’s not supposed to be _your_ blood.”

Slowly, Peter’s claws recede. The girl purses her lips the way he remembers, then rolls her eyes and deigns to offer him a tissue. Peter takes it; it’s soft and real. He looks at her. “You’re not a ghost, are you?”

“Of course I’m not.” She snorts. “Took you long enough to figure it out. I thought you were supposed to be the smart one.”

It sounds like an inside joke that Peter isn’t in on. He doesn’t care. He’s too busy figuring it out. She’s not a ghost, but she’s not _right_. She appears from nowhere. She hasn’t aged a day in four years. She knows his name, but he doesn’t know her scent. She talks to him like she knows _him_ , and she says things like _not yet_. He scrubs at the blood on his hands, and the tissue tears to pieces. “Are you an omen?”

Surprisingly, she laughs. It’s not a nice sound. “Some people call me that, yes.”

“And what do others call you?” Peter asks.

She sits on the wall several feet away from him and stays quiet so long he thinks she won’t answer. Then she says, “Lydia. My name is Lydia.”

“And what _are_ you?” he presses.

Lydia tosses her strawberry hair. Her eyes are no longer hollow, but bright and wild. Peter is smart enough to know he’s playing with fire. “I’m from the future, Peter Hale. Ask me one question.”

This is an offering, but Peter doesn’t know what kind. Is he supposed to ask a question that will prove her claim? Or is he being gifted an answer to just one of life’s gnawing uncertainties? Peter knows which he wants, so he does what he always does: he takes it. “Is my sister going to live?”

Lydia’s eyes go strangely blank. Not dead like before, but guarded. “That’s what you want to know?”

“She almost didn’t. The first time. With Laura.” Peter lifts his head high and refuses to be uncertain. If she’s from the future, he shouldn’t have to explain himself.

“You don’t want to know about yourself?” Lydia asks.

Peter swallows hard. “You’ve already told me about myself. Even if you didn’t mean to. I want to know about my sister.”

Lydia considers him. The fire in her eyes is banked. It almost makes her look warm, but he knows better. “This doesn’t kill her. Neither does the next one.”

It should be a relief, but Peter is too well-versed in the art of not-lying. He’d asked if his sister was going to live, and Lydia didn’t say yes. She might as well have said _not yet_. “So she’s dead. In your time, she’s dead.”

“In my time, a lot of people are dead,” Lydia says.

“But I’m not.” Peter was only given one question, but that’s okay. He knows the answer to this one.

He’s smart. Good at running, good at surviving.

* * *

After she hears baby Derek’s first-ever cry, things get too weird for her. She stops screaming. She stops tearing apart the tangle of time only to find Peter fucking Hale always waiting on the other side, like a bad cosmic joke. Like the universe saying to her, _here, have unimaginable power, and use it to go crawling back to the one person who has ever made you feel powerless_.

It’s true, but it’s only half the truth.

That night on the lacrosse field, she screamed and screamed, and no one heard her. She screamed in the shower in the hospital. She woke up from nightmares of dirt and blood and his charred corpse, and she screamed until her throat was raw and her mother fed her pills. Useless, it was useless every time. When Lydia was five years old, her scream was _powerful_.

Peter took that from her, but then he gave it back to her tenfold.

 _I’m the spark that lit your fire, sweetheart_ , he’d said to her once, and she wonders if he knew that only meant they both would burn.

* * *

This time, Peter finds her in the woods. Something is different, and it’s not just because he’s years older yet again, or because every other time he’s seen her has been at the house. It’s her. Her hair is wet, almost as if it’s raining, but the night sky is impossibly clear. That’s a fascinating thought to Peter—she’s bringing back rainwater from the future. Will it drip into the forest floor, sink into the roots and kill the life it touches, a foreign invader?

She’s trembling, and her eyes are wide and wet, like someone has put out her fire. She has this fractured quality that Peter doesn’t know what to do with, though it’s cute, in a prey sort of way—which is the kind of thing he’s not supposed to think lest Talia start sending him to therapy twice a week instead of just once. _We’re wolves, Peter, but we’re humans too—sometimes you can help the deer with the broken leg, instead of killing it_.

 _But a deer can’t survive with a broken leg_ , Peter used to argue. _So isn’t killing it the kinder thing, really?_

Peter doesn’t argue anymore; he and his sister have better things to fight about these days. Things that drive him out into the woods to stumble upon pretty girls no one else believes in.

To be fair, he’d stopped trying to convince anyone a long time ago.

“Lydia,” he says. “Nice dress.”

It is nice. It’s pretty blue silk, and it does wonderful things for the fiery color of her hair. She smiles tremulously. “It’s my birthday.”

“You don’t seem very happy about that,” Peter says.

“I don’t like my birthday. Some asshole kind of ruined it for me awhile back.” Lydia straightens up straighter and drags her wet hair back from her face. Something eases in Peter’s chest; he likes her better as a predator. She gives him a familiar sardonic look. “You could say today is our five-year anniversary.”

“Ah.” Peter takes that puzzle piece and files it quietly away for future examination. He wants to know more, he _always_ wants to know more—Talia says fondly that’s his biggest flaw, as if they don’t both know he has far worse qualities—but he’s learned that asking questions often equates to showing his hand. People say more if they don’t know someone’s listening.

Lydia steps closer. “How old are you, Peter?”

“Twenty-three.” Peter lets her come closer and doesn’t ask why he hasn’t seen her since he was seventeen. She looks the same as always. Clearly, it hasn’t been six years for her. He’s learned there’s no point in feeling abandoned.

Her smile this time is pleased, like she’s won something. “You’re older than me. I just turned twenty-two.”

 _Happy birthday_ doesn’t seem like the right response. Peter stays quiet, cataloguing the smudges under her eyes, like her party makeup had run and she’d tried to wipe it off. He lets his gaze drag down her body, right up until she reaches up and cups his face in her hands. He nearly shoves her back in shock, because that’s the first time in fifteen years that she’s ever touched him. Somehow, he still hadn’t expected her to be solid. For her skin to be soft and ice-cold.

“Show me your eyes,” she whispers.

Peter flicks his eyes up to hers and lets them flash gold. Still gold. She rests her forehead against his with a shaky little sigh. He almost misses the moment they go from that to kissing.

It’s the first time.

It doesn’t feel like the first time.

The first time he saw her, he wondered if her red lips would taste like candy or blood. They taste like blood. He thinks it’s because she bites him, but that’s okay, he likes the idea of his blood in her mouth. He kisses her until she stops him with a hand on his chest, and seeing her smile is only marginally less thrilling than feeling it against his own.

“Don’t ask questions,” she tells him.

She takes him by the hand and leads him home.

Peter mostly keeps his mouth shut. He has a thousand questions, but he’s become very practiced at swallowing them down. He wants to make a joke about the chains that used to be on his bed, but he knows better. Lydia had told him eleven years ago that she was an omen. Peter believes her. He feels things when she’s around, things that are more than a wolf’s instincts. He _knows_ things, and not just because she’s from the future and she tells him.

He knows this is the last time she’s coming back to visit him. He can feel it in his bones.

So he takes her to bed, and he doesn’t ask questions she won’t answer, and he doesn’t tease her, except with his head between her thighs. She tastes like blood here too, but she’s warm. Trembling still, but her grip on his hair is tight and unforgiving.

Maybe he wants forgiving. He doesn’t know what he’s going to do to her, or if he’s going to apologize after, but he can apologize now. He likes the idea of building up some goodwill before he helps shatter those pretty green eyes.

She lets him apologize so many times that the third one makes her scream and the last one makes her cry, and then she lets him hold her. His blanket is tugged over them, and she’s got all her limbs twisted up in his and her face buried in his chest, and it satisfies him to know that even when she goes back, wherever she goes after this, she’ll still smell like him.

“Peter Hale,” she whispers against his chest, but even so it sounds the way it always does when she says his name—like a prophecy, like a curse, like the way people used to call him _clever_. “You’re really hot.”

“Thank you, I know,” Peter says, but mostly out of surprise. To say that isn’t what he’d expected to hear would be an understatement. He’d half-expected her to tell him when he’s going to die.

Lydia laughs and bites his shoulder. Then she does it again, harder, fingers digging into his ribs, and Peter can feel how part of her wants to tear him apart this way. He might let her. She shakes her head against his chest. “No, I mean, you’re _warm_. I’m actually warm.”

The awe in her voice isn’t something Peter can understand, so he doesn’t try. He kisses her hair, nuzzles there and doesn’t care if she knows he’s inhaling her scent. Memorizing it. “Wolves run hot, sweetheart.”

“My spark,” she mumbles, but she sounds half-asleep, and Peter knows she’ll be gone when he wakes up.

* * *

Lydia never really learns the rules of time travel before she decides she isn’t going to do it anymore. She doesn’t even figure out how to control it. She only screams, and steps into the past, and she doesn’t know how far back she’s going each time, only where she’ll end up.

When Peter is eight, she thinks about killing him. She wonders if that’s allowed, and what it would change in her future. Would the universe course correct? Would all the awful still happen, just with a different villain?

When Peter is twelve, it occurs to her that really, if she’s going to be killing anybody, it should be Kate Argent. Maybe she wouldn’t even have to. Maybe all she’d have to do is tell Peter, when he’s seventeen and the teenager she remembers from the worst weeks of her life, that someone is going to try to burn his family to the ground, years from now, and she could give him the date and the time and tell him he needed to watch out for his nephew, to _protect_ him.

Maybe none of it would make a difference. Maybe none of this is even real.

When Peter is twenty-three, she decides this will be the last time. That will be how she retains her sanity and, maybe, whatever is left of her innocence. If she ever had any to begin with.

If she isn’t going to do it anymore, there’s only one question left, and that one she can answer here and now. If she so desires. Which she’s not sure she does. If Peter does somehow have these new childhood memories she’s so recently given him, if he does remember, he’s only going to be unbearable about it.

* * *

The morning after her twenty-second birthday, she’s sitting at home—her mother’s home, now, because Beacon Hills hasn’t been home to her since she left for college—and it’s the strangest thing. She’s warm in a way that has nothing to do with the mug of hot tea she’s cradling, or the knit cardigan over her nightgown. It’s as if she’s been cured of a creeping poison in her veins she’s been denying all these years.

She finds a box on the windowsill in her bedroom. A carved wooden box full of purple flowers, and a note wishing her a happy five-year anniversary.


End file.
